Responding to a Call for Backup

Thousand Oaks is always near the top of any list of low-crime cities. Its volunteer citizen policing force, profiled here, may have some lessons for cities and neighborhoods in Los Angeles County.

When they first donned khaki uniforms and rolled out in surplus patrol cars 16 months ago, the Volunteers in Policing were billed as a platoon of extra eyes and ears for Ventura County sheriff’s deputies.

But this unpaid, unarmed force of schoolteachers, tradesmen, homemakers and retirees also turned out to be a squad of extra badges. And they earned something they had not quite expected: Respect.

Speeders hit the brakes at the sight of VIP squad cars.

Drunks act sober and rowdy teenagers pipe down when uniformed two-person VIP teams draw near.

Concerned citizens flag them down to report neighborhood nuisances and missing children.

And the regular sheriff’s deputies who are trained, armed and ordered to protect the city of Thousand Oaks from violent crime are grateful that the VIPs give them more time to do their job.

“When you have these people putting in 40 hours a week riding around, that’s 40 hours the deputies have to do [their] duties,” said Thousand Oaks City Councilman Mike Markey, a Compton police detective.

“I’d like to have that type of program to help me out as an officer,” Markey said. “This really frees up an officer’s time to go out and do real law enforcement.”

In a basement office at the sheriff’s station in Thousand Oaks, 50 or so volunteers shoulder much of the department’s grunt work: taking fingerprints, filing, writing stolen-property reports and logging requests from vacationing homeowners to keep an eye on their houses.

On the street, the 35 patrol volunteers have limited training, limited powers and no weapon stronger than pepper spray.

But they are empowered to take reports on runaway teenagers, obscene phone calls, trespassers and thieves ranging from petty vandals to those who commit grand theft.

And they hand out hefty parking tickets for able-bodied scofflaws who take handicapped spaces.

Since June, the VIPs have put in 4,450 hours, driven 5,646 miles on patrol, fingerprinted nearly 3,000 adults and children and written 85 reports on cases ranging from thefts to missing persons, said Betty Horner, the VIPs’ administrative coordinator and a founding member of the patrol.

The VIP program was modeled after similar forces in the Orange County cities of Fountain Valley and Huntington Beach, where elderly volunteers free officers from routine tasks so they can focus on combating major crime.

The volunteers in Thousand Oaks recently helped deputies arrest two Los Angeles men who had shoplifted 1,000 items in a string of drugstore thefts. The volunteers have helped track down Alzheimer’s patients who wander away from home, and other missing persons. Last month, they worked on crowd control so sheriff’s deputies could concentrate on a mock disaster drill at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza.

“They do more now” than when the program first sprang from the Sheriff’s Citizens’ Academy nearly two years ago, said Sgt. Jeff Matson, who oversees crime prevention programs for Thousand Oaks.

“I think as we’ve progressed, we’ve found more functions for them to do. . . . They’ve been involved in arson watches. When they had a sex offender [hanging around] at the Oaks Mall, we had them out on the rooftops in the rain looking.”

It’s not all manhunts and stakeouts, though.

Although VIPs spend about half their time on the street, the other half is spent on routine tasks and special projects.

Writing reports and taking complaints eat up much of the volunteers’ time in the office--time that would otherwise occupy deputies.

Last week, a volunteer photographed everyone who works in East Valley Station. The mug shots will go up on a magnetic message board to help the newer staff members recognize the veterans and vice versa.

“All of our operations we deem as very important,” Horner said.

“Sometimes, they say we do the mundane things that the officers don’t have time to do, but our people don’t like that word very well,” she said. “We feel our job is very important here. Even if you’re just sharpening pencils, you’re helping.”

But for many VIPs the reward of volunteering comes on patrol.

Jane Berlin and Barbara Platt knew each other in the San Fernando Valley 19 years ago, and hung out with friends who were police officers. Now they hang out together as VIPs.

Describing herself as a 40-year-old middle school teacher who’s now “nosy about somebody else’s occupation,” Berlin decided to join the first Sheriff’s Department Citizens’ Academy.

After she was hooked by the academy--a sort of hands-on crash course in police work for the average Jane--the department reeled her in and recruited her for the first VIP patrol.

Platt, 39, a corporate travel officer whose sister is a police officer, decided to join the VIPs several months ago because “I wanted to know what she does out there on the street.”

Before patrol one day, Berlin checked the contents of her black nylon duty bag--clipboard, report forms, cellular phone, walkie-talkie, traffic-control flashlight and other emergency gear--and talked about the reputation of Thousand Oaks as one of the safest cities in the nation.

It was an average night for the partners, mostly spent cruising through strip malls and parking structures, checking on vacationers’ houses and scanning ATM kiosks and liquor stores for lurking robbers.

Their repainted Ford Crown Victoria cruiser--complete with amber flashers and all the worn-in rattles of a 100,000-mile car--rolls slowly past darkened shops.

They prowl through the parking lot at a gym, the car’s spotlight beam stabbing the dark every now and then as they check on reports of a rash of car break-ins.

And when they drive up behind West Lake Hills Elementary School to check on a graffiti complaint, a neighborhood homeowners’ committee member flags them down to lodge another complaint: A men’s soccer team that plays at the school field on Saturday afternoons has been using the bushes for a bathroom.

Berlin and Platt talk with the man for a bit, then hand him a card with a phone number he can use if he has any other complaints.

As they roll away Platt playfully punches Berlin on the shoulder: “We had a contaaaaact!”

Berlin replies with a grin as she scribbles on the clipboard, “I just made the note.”

Then the radio dispatcher orders them across town to take a report on a missing teenager. As the volunteers cruise up Westlake Boulevard, their patrol car parts the traffic flow like the prow of a steamer.

Platt says: “It’s fun when we’re driving around. People don’t realize we can’t ticket them, but they put on the brakes or put on their seat belts.”

She pauses with a sly smile: “And then they see the Volunteers logo and go speeding off.”